Unable to find the press staff, hungry, and clearly too early for the story, your correspondent ducked out and strolled along the nearby San Antonio Riverwalk, a parallel reality with little put-put tourist boats going by where nobody seemed aware that a presidential candidate was about to stop nearby (and nor was anyone there campaigning to rope them in).

Not an explicit back-room conspiracy though the tech world has its share of those, but rather, an emergent conspiracy of risk-aversion and overstuffed comfort that has turned our once-heroic, envelope-pushing defenders into a race of cowardly, timid toymakers whose wares put-put along alongside of the roaring engines of progress in the world of general-purpose computers and networks...